People already do speak their minds, and heavy downvoting is often limited to comments that are unsubstantive. You may dislike the downvote, but I'd stop using this site if it were removed.
The chilling effect is a bad thing for any individual who has a point they want to make, but it also makes people less reactionary and more thoughtful which is better for the community. Overall I think downvotes are a net positive.
I don't think so. Back when I was running my startup I would occasionally refrain from posting on some of the more divisive topics where my opinions aren't inline with the concensus here.
Investors, customers, and peers read HN, so maintaining a clean history can seem moderately important.
Well, those kind of comments do get downvoted, but people on HN do also downvote comments simply because they disagree with them (often regardless of whether the comments are perfectly civil, and just express a point of view that the downvoter doesn't share). Of course, many of those downvoting these comments would be quick to label them as "misguided" or "unhelpful", at which point there is usually little reason to argue about it.
It's an imperfect system, but I'd guess it is a net positive at least most of the time. It does help to filter out when people are just being total jerks.
Maybe, but I don't think that would improve the quality of discussion. When I get downvoted, it's usually because I'm a) factually wrong b) didn't explain the reasoning behind a counterintuitive statement or c) disagreed with someone on an emotionally charged topic. At least in cases a) and b), downvotes help me improve my writing.
Definitely agree. I find when I'm downvoted it was due to being an impulsive post rather than a well thought out post.
With the amount you see people say 'I'll get downvoted for this but...' then go on to be the top post, I think the downvoted helps more than hurts.
There's groupthink of course, but I feel the HN community is more responsible with it, and that comes from someone who often disagrees with the majority (personally, rarely expressed).
I suggest an amendment to the downvote such that if your total lifetime positive (excluding downvotes) reaches say 1000 or 1500, you should also get the ability to downvote. It’s much easier to lose points than gain them on the site.
I don't think it's easier to lose points here. Gaining points is easy if your comments are constructive and actionable. Opinions and anything argumentative generally isn't very useful.
One thing you can try is looking through your comment history and see which of your comments got the most upvotes. One of my highest upvotes was in a thread about whether software engineers should waste time doing telephone customer support, and I linked to a story of when William from Microsoft took a customer support call:
Checking your most upvoted comments can also be a way to find topics that you should turn into a blog post. If the HN community found it interesting and suddenly gave you 10x the upvotes you usually get, then it's probably also useful to the wider world.
When I've been downvoted, it's usually because I've poorly researched something & provided incorrect information.
While I agree with you that arguments are not constructive, a healthy disagreement of differing opinions should not have the implicit correctness go to the person with the ability to downvote his adversary. Furthermore, there is a psychological aspect to voting positively for a negatively voted comment unless its something you absolutely agree with. I might lack tact, (which is hard to convey in text), but that doesn't make answers I've submitted that were backed by cited facts only to be downvoted on trivial meta issues weren't 100% correct.
I personally think the downvoting feature is fine, just really overused by people with much more karma that it makes the website less enjoyable to visit, especially for new people. And sure, one of the things I love about this site is that there are legitimate gurus on here, but a lot of people take their ability to downvote to classic Dunning Kruger syndrome.
Perhaps a quarter point penalty for downvoting to stop spamming and for people to consider the worthiness of a downvote or ignore. After all, Karma is how you treat others, and constantly negging them with no explanation isn't very kind at all especially for the majority of the people on this site that just want to learn.
Or if downvoting cost the downvoter one karma point. So they'd have to make the choice between contributing a comment to contest the issue or lazily pushing the down arrow and losing karma.
I generally try to upvote only. It really annoys me to see some comment down voted to grey oblivion with no follow-up comments explaining why. Particularly when looking back at older topics; was the post wrong, or just unpopular?
In that case, sorry for the passive-aggressiveness. I'm from Pakistan, and since I know what the n-word is, I assumed it was fairly common knowledge. I was wrong :(
This is absolutely worth it. I've been reading like this maybe half of my account's lifecycle. It is rare to see legitimate spam. More often you find real posts from accounts that trip the "spam account" detector because they're throwaways, or controversial but valid opinions that got flagkilled.
Sometimes you'll even find real accounts that have a years-long history of meaningful contribution. [0] It is most infuriating when these people get hellbanned just for pushing the limit once, or for triggering the mods extra hard one day.
[Quick note on old accounts that earn hellbans: I've noticed a correlation between the posting of something MRA-ish/anti-feminist and accounts getting a permanent hellban. If you have such political leanings (which I'm not endorsing or supporting) and want your account to remain in good standing, don't let them leak out on HN. Go to your regularly-scheduled Disgusting Online Den of Scum and Villainy (TM). It may be that this is only noticed because most other hot-button issues are already understood to be taboo, but sometimes the gender-in-tech threads run afield...]
There is a whole cast of characters that you can only find if you showdead. Most of these people have since realized that it's a waste of time to post here and gone away, but you'll still see the regulars pop up now and then, or find them in historic threads.
There is pg_is_a_butt, whose posts are sometimes insightful, except he ends each one with something like "you're all idiots". There is LoseThos, author of the amazing TempleOS [1], who will usually post some form of incoherent babble that is framed up like scripture. These are usually not worth much by themselves, but they remind me that he exists, which is great. And there are the heartbreaking cases mentioned above, of good contributors getting flagged off and seeing their profile activity slowly peter out as they wonder why no one replies to their posts anymore. [Vouching can actually make this more confusing, because they have ONE comment that gets replies/interest, so assume they must not be shadowbanned, they just must be going senile and have nothing worth saying anymore. You'll also get your vouching rights revoked if you vouch for something the mods don't like.]
Anyway, there's usually a discernible reason for something to be dead, but it's frequently not a good one. You'll be missing out on a lot of good stuff by keeping showdead off.
Disclaimer, lest one plunge in too anxiously: there are also things that truly deserve the flag and/or ban, and you'll have to tolerate seeing that. It helps that HN doesn't allow media embeds, but do be careful following links, etc., and probably avoid if your sensitivity to offensive text or ideas is higher than your interest in useful-but-controversial information.
> It is most infuriating when these people get hellbanned just for pushing the limit once, or for triggering the mods extra hard one day.
…
> You'll also get your vouching rights revoked if you vouch for something the mods don't like.
I really wish that HN could figure out a way to fix the problem of abusive moderation. Moderation is, I think, really important and valuable — but it's so important that it's easily misused.
And of course just crowd-sourcing it doesn't work, because the crowd can just shout down important viewpoints.
I'm still working my way towards earning the downvote! I have been on the site for over 6 years and browse more than I contribute, but I still am shy a little of the 500 karma required. I wonder if there are users with even older accounts than mine that are still active and don't have the karma yet either.
Think of all the real work you have done in that time. You would not have done it all had you spent 1000+ hours collecting those internet points that none of your real friends care about.
You are winning by not being able to downvote yet.
EDIT: ...as I up-vote y'all stuck in this thread...
Just celebrated my 6 years on HN last month, and a little over half way there myself. Not sure I'm wise enough to downvote correctly though: sometimes I wish to downvote someone because what he said is stupid, but that's not how you use downvotes.
Even before you get the ability to downvote, the fascist regime will stop counting your upvotes if you upvote the wrong comments (ones which have been secretly flagged by the mods).
However, if you're careful you can use your upvotes against those comments that you don't like by upvoting everything around them.
I wish the downvote button was two step (while upvote as is) where a user had to select from things like off topic, spam, etc. Maybe a decoy disagree too for letting the new user downvote but not counting it.
Definitely. Some of the most valuable posts are downvoted. Thats what makes them so valuable - sometimes the conventional wisdom is so wrong that when someone with specialist knowledge chimes in people reject it.
Try posting here about anything related to nutrition and the health risks of eating meat...
Well there are actually two ideas in the parent comment.
On Slashdot, upvotes and downvotes each came with a label. So upvote wasn't just an up-arrow, it was more like "+1, Helpful" or "+1, Funny". And downvotes weren't just a down arrow, the options were like "-1, Off Topic" or "-1, Abusive". Don't hold me to the actual labels, but you get the idea. There was also a cap; each post could only go so far down (can't remember) or up (pretty sure that was 5). Overall, this system was called moderation.
There was also meta-moderation, where people had to review someone else's votes up or down, and verify them. This way, people who were making bad votes could get caught by the community.
The ability to moderate or meta-moderate was hooked into the karma score, but I can't remember exactly how. Meta-moderation was like a chore you had to do sometimes to maintain the right to moderate, as I recall.
I'm sure there is a write-up somewhere that could do a better job than my off-teh-cuff remembering.
The labels were insightful, interesting, informative, funny, overrated, underrated, redundant, troll, flamebait, offtopic, etc. Comments maxed out at +5. You could set a threshold so you'd only see +2 and higher, etc.
At some point, you could adjust your personal measure for the categories of positive or negative moderation. e.g., threads turned into boring rushes to post memes for +1 Funny, so at one point I made Funny worth zero and Insightful worth +2. It was an interesting way to influence how a thread appeared for you. But around that time, I lost interest in the site and quit it for HN.
You couldn't vote all the time (like on HN), but you periodically received 5 mod points to use, so you would tend to pick the most deserving to boost or demote.
From memory, periodically, you might get meta-moderation points. Say, 10 chances to assess whether a post's moderation was fair or unfair. It was half-chore, half-interesting so it was often a happy distraction.
More info for those with too much time on their hands:
This feature exists in lobste.rs [0] and it is effective for making people think twice before downvoting anything. Atleast for me and I seem to think to again, if I want to downvote anything or not
Im a firm believer that one shouldn't be allowed to downvote without leaving a comment. In instances like spam or trolling we have the 'flag' option, which if abused should then cost people karma and/or the privilege of moderation.
I say this because I often get downvoted because people don't understand my point (sometimes due to my own fault badly explaining myself, sometimes the readers fault for skimming my post) and it's not until several downvoted before someone finally chimes in an clarifies why.
Negative rep get so badly abused on this site and the most frustrating thing about it all is whenever the topic gets raised you get downvoted to hell.
There is also a disappointing trend to kneejerk downvote any comment that disagrees with any of the "famous" (for want a better description) names on HN simply because member "xyz" must be wrong if they're arguing with the famed member "abc"; regardless of whatever point xyz had made. It's daft hero worshipping.
Then there's the amount of times people can get down voted on popular threads just because they dared express and unpopular opinion.
Overall I genuinely think the quality of comments on this site has dropped over the years and I think it's directly related to the increase in members reaching the threshold to negative moderate. It gets harder to have an adult conversation when half the time people are kneejerk downvoting rather than posting a rebuttal or simply asking for clarification on why an opinion was formed to begin with. It's gotten to the point that I'm sure many people now question whether they can be bothered with the potential backlash or whether they're better off just keeping quiet. Which results in some tropes (for want a better description) not getting peer reviewed or debunked because it's such a popular piece of misinformation that the correction isn't worth the backlash.
Lastly, I get sick of people saying we shouldn't take negative rep personally. It's someone actively saying "I don't agree with you but I'm not going to state why." There is no other response to that other than frustration.
> Im a firm believer that one shouldn't be allowed to downvote without leaving a comment.
The purpose of downvoting is to reduce the effective signal to noise ratio by:
(1) reducing the prominence of low-quality posts, and
(2) signalling the types of posts the community finds to be low quality, which will then be reduced in prominence.
Commenting increases the prominence of a post, and as such counteracts part of the purpose of downvotes. It may occasionally be warranted to reinforce the other half of the purpose, but generally not.
> I say this because I often get downvoted because people don't understand my point
Just because someone else suggests that as their reason or a possible reason does not mean that is why other people are downvoting you.
> There is also a disappointing trend to kneejerk downvote any comment that disagrees with any of the "famous" (for want a better description) names on HN simply because member "xyz" must be wrong if they're arguing with the famed member "abc"; regardless of whatever point xyz had made.
I don't think that's true at all; I do think that replies to some of the more well-known posters are more likely to get read and, therefore, voted up or down, but I don't see a lot of evidence for the kind of fan-club voting you suggest (I don't think I'd be on the leaderboard if that was the case, since I think even when I was fairly new a fair share of my posts were disagreeing with some of the more prominent figures here.)
> Then there's the amount of times people can get down voted on popular threads just because they dared express and unpopular opinion.
IME, that doesn't really happen. Any opinion on a controversial thread can get downvoted for no apparent reason -- there defintely are people who downvote for shallow disagreement -- but it rarely seems to last if there isn't a better reason for downvoting, and it seems to happen across the space of ideas (I've seen HN be accused of being a left-wing hive mind, a libertarian hive-mind, and a hive-mind of several different other bents; its not any of those, its got lots of different active factions with lots of different views.)
> It gets harder to have an adult conversation when half the time people are kneejerk downvoting rather than posting a rebuttal or simply asking for clarification on why an opinion was formed to begin with.
I'd rather say it gets harder to have an adult conversation when people lack the introspection to realize the reasons that their comments are getting downvoted into oblivion while others expressing similar ideology in a different manner or not has nothing to do with disagreement, or popular poster fan clubs, and everything to do with the quality of their posts.
> There is no other response to that other than frustration.
Yes, there is another possible response and its called introspection and review of the guidelines.
I've gotten posts downvoted, and of those that have stayed that way more than a few hours, the vast majority have deserved it and I've gotten better at not making the same mistakes. Sure, I think there have been some mistakes (but I have seen a lot more cases of posts of mine being upvoted that don't deserve it.)
Same here - if one wants to get the skinny or get to the bottom of an issue, looking at the downvoted comments will often (although not always) quickly reveal the real story behind a particular subject. The downvotes have in reality become the upvotes.
I see your point about the reason for lowering the prominence of "bad" comments but frankly I think misinformed comments deserve more detailed corrections than just down voting. It means people actually learn something rather than misinformation getting if ores and thus continue to be spread. In fact some of the best comments on here have been people writing detailed rebuttals
Also I think from your last paragraph you do agree that moderation often gets abused even if you don't agree with the individual points I raised?
> Also I think from your last paragraph you do agree that moderation often gets abused even if you don't agree with the individual points I raised?
I think it works well in aggregate, even though there are some individual bad votes. I think that the system is designed in a way which anticipates imperfection in individual acts but is designed to get good results on-balance, and I think obsessing about the individual bad votes is unproductive in most cases.
The problem is that it's no longer individual bad votes. I would estimate that at least 1 in 5 of my comments are voted down (albeit just to zero) with no obvious reason why. While the rest of my comments are typically voted up fairly substantially. I don't vary the quality of my posts and try not to make a habit of commenting on topics I'm ill informed in. So either I'm being singled out by an individual with a grudge (which I doubt but I think HN is smart enough to detect those kind of voting patterns anyway?) or the moderation system on here is broken. Either way I can't predict which posts will get voted on in which way and the individual bad votes have now become anything but sparse.
(I upvoted because you're making a reasonable point politely).
I disagree with this bit:
> Im a firm believer that one shouldn't be allowed to downvote without leaving a comment.
I think the site needs a mechanism where people can express disagreement without leaving a comment, because a downvote is mostly meaningless and comments can lead to angry bickering threads.
I do agree (and I've changed my mind on this in the past 2 years or so) that people downvote too quickly, and that people don't supply enough corrective upvotes.
>Im a firm believer that one shouldn't be allowed to downvote without leaving a comment.
I guess that's been discussed/thought about many times. Does sound good at first. So how would it work? People would have to leave some kind of decent comment, not just one word, I suppose, like other comments. Could you downvote those comments in turn if they weren't substantive, or were snarky etc? Would you have then to explain why you did that? Hmm. There'd have to be a different comment category, a downvote-explanation comment. Sounds complicated..
> There is no other response to that other than frustration.
Well, yes there is! I tried that, doesn't work. I tried not caring. Is working great! They're only fake internet points, after all. But you said you're sick of people saying that. Sorry. ..Sometimes it's just too obvious why horrid, abusive comments are downvoted. From what I've seen, how people say things is almost always the problem, not what they said. What seems to drive people nuts is presuming it's always what they said.
> Im a firm believer that one shouldn't be allowed to downvote without leaving a comment
I used to believe that until I put it into practice on my forum. Nah, turns out there's a class of comment that's so stupid that you're just forcing people to waste their time by responding to it. And that sort of comment is more common than you think, you just may be insulated from them by the work of other people.
Browse reddit by controversial posts first, for example.
Then please abolish the upvote too. Because it too most often means "I agree".
What you propose is a bad solution because it breaks symmetry.
If people are upvoting because they agree (and if you agree you tend to think about the comment like it brings value), they should be able to downvote because they disagree.
Overzealous moderation and self-censorship already makes HN too sterile place to be cozy. And similar to too sterile environments in real life it has a potential to weakening your immune system and cause auto-immune diseases.
Interesting concept. I am the creator of the BeeLine Reader browser plugin, which applies a color gradient to make text blocks easier/faster to read. I go back and forth on whether this functionality is a net benefit on sites like HN, where our text coloring obfuscates the underlying color (and the downvoting that it communicates).
Sometimes I will disable it on HN if I'm engaging in a lot of discussions where I'd like to be able to see if other comments have been downvoted. If anyone else here uses this plugin, I'd be very interested to know if you've disabled it on HN or if you find the functionality to be helpful. We can make it default on/off on certain sites, so feedback is appreciated.
Downvotes (and flaggings) on comments are HN's biggest flaw. It has turned this site into a giant echo chamber and has completely killed any chance of having diversity of opinions.
If you do not conform, you will be downvoted into oblivion. So people censor themselves as a result.
> If you do not conform, you will be downvoted into oblivion. So people censor themselves as a result.
I see radically divergent opinions on many threads which are not "downvoted into oblivion".
The things I do see downvoted into oblivion are usually unsubstantive and/or uncivil, and themselves come from all directions, often from a similar apparent ideology to comments that are not downvoted.
But if people who would otherwise post in a similar manner to the posts downvoted into oblivion are censoring themselves, I think the functionality is working as intended.
You'll still see those opinions if you have the link, but there is a very obvious pattern of removing threads about contentious issues from the front page once they reach a certain amount of wrong think.
Either the admins are turning a blind eye, or they're not paying attention. At this point my money is on the former.
The supreme irony of course is that lately the most recurring instances are about the memo that was titled "Google's ideological echo chamber". It's an open secret which cliques have a septic response to disagreement, and who simply wants to be heard but is treated as malicious.
Empathy for me, not for thee, and feelings of safety are more important than actual safety. The content of people's skin is more important than their character.
> You'll still see those opinions if you have the link, but there is a very obvious pattern of removing threads about contentious issues from the front page once they reach a certain amount of wrong think.
There's an obvious pattern of removing threads about contentious issues from the front page due to an overt automated moderation feature referred to as the "flamewar detector" designed to demote posts than generate more heat than light, judged by comments vs. upvotes on the post. This is reinforced by the fact that posts that are likely to turn into flamewars are also likely to get flagged by users who are tired of the recurring flamewars.
Of course, removing such posts from the front page is a completely different issue (independent of methodology) from bias in downvotes.
The existence of a mechanism doesn't absolve HN of responsibility or guarantee objectivity, it just means there is a fig leaf of plausible deniability. Equating vigorous debate with a flamewar is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It is also pretty ridiculous to posit no link between the different moderation mechanisms. Being downvoted unjustly and reflexively is going to annoy commenters and make them comment back in defense. It sends a social signal that some view is unacceptable, which makes them look like troublemakers a priori.
It's also inaccurate to call this an overt feature, because there is no disclosure on affected threads. While I'm sympathetic to not wanting to stoke fires, it's fair to think the system is being gamed when I never see this happen to threads that skew in the opposite direction about a story that promotes the orthodox view. It will also create exactly the kind of unresolved discussions that guarantee a repeat until the end of time, as a self fulfilling prophecy.
The vigorous discussion should be a sign that people do want to discuss it, and I'm not convinced the flaggers and downvoters are representative of what the community at large believes. In the case of the Damore memo, informal anonymous surveys inside Google showed a very mixed landscape, in a company that skews very orthodox already. For a community that draws from a much wider geography, it is fair to assume even more disagreement. There is ample evidence of ends-justifies-means behavior from the people who want to impose their moral order on the tech scene, and pretending it isn't happening, under the guise of promoting reasonable debate, is incredibly naive.
If anything, these threads should be explicitly allowed to stand, leaving it up to individuals to decide whether to wade in, perhaps with a "keep it civil" preamble.
> The existence of a mechanism doesn't absolve HN of responsibility
I didn't say it did, I said that the mechanism which detects controversy withoutbconcern for ideology was far more likely to blame than an ideological bias.
Obviously, HN is responsible for the existence of the mechanism.
> or guarantee objectivity,
I don't see objectivity as a goal in the first place. The overt standard for inclusion in HN [0], “anything good hackers would find interesting”, that which “gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity”; not “[m]ost stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon” [emphasis added] are inherently highly subjective.
If you want objectivity, a community whose overt standards are highly subjective is not where you want to go. But it's quite odd to come and sign up for a community with such overt standards and then spend a lot of time complaining about the lack of objectivity—it was literally what you signed up for.
> Being downvoted unjustly and reflexively is going to annoy commenters and make them comment back in defense.
Commenting on downvotes is explicitly against the commenting guidelines. Downvotes do not, under any circumstances, compel responses, nor will they ever produce responses from people following the rules of the community.
To the extent that people are positing about downvotes they or others have recieved, they are deliberately and wantonly violating the norms of the community by so doing (it's also quite stupid, even aside from the norms, to do so quickly because on controversial topics inappropriate downvotes are quite often negated within a few hours.)
> The vigorous discussion should be a sign that people do want to discuss it
Which they can (and do) continue to do, and if you want to catch those ongoing controversies you can browse in “comments” view instead of the front page. The front page is for things that generate more light than heat. You can choose your view based on your preferences.
Ironically you're being down voted because of your post.
Having seen some atrocious perspectives and opinions and Hacker News, being able to challenge some one or offer a rebuttal that doesn't turn into a comment storm is important. I don't want to engage with a troll. I want to give them a down vote and hope they're flagged and removed more often than not (I can't down vote anyone yet...).
But, there's a fine line between down voting some one because they're offensive, obtuse or obnoxious and disagreeing with some one's opinion.
I don't agree with you. In fact I outright disagree with your opinion on HN becoming an echo chamber. I believe HN is far an echo chamber, I also think it's far more diverse than most. But naturally and organically the opinions here tend to confirm with a certain bias and I like to think that's because we here on HN take more time to discuss our conversations and perspectives than the echo chambers you find on Reddit or on Facebook.
I want to believe HN is more in line with a common good, a common ideal and common truth of humanity (you can call me out on being naive here if you wish, I'm feeling more optimistic today than I normally do and I don't know why but let's let sleeping dogs lie, my cynicism is usually relentless...).
So, yeah. I disagree with you. But I wouldn't down vote you. Even if I could.
Edit: poor choice of words, sentence structure, I rushed it all to get it out in time in the hope one day I can get to 500 karma and down vote trolls.
> In fact I outright disagree with your opinion on HN becoming an echo chamber.
I wouldn't say its a black and white issue. It heavily depends on the topic.
For example the Google Memo. Even the slightest hint that someone agrees (on specific points) with damore was a guarantee for downvotes.
In that case i would say HN reflects some sort of echo chamber.
Some of my highest-upvoted comments were made in that thread, agreeing with specific points. There were also plenty of downvotes, but somehow the balance still ended up positive.
I don't think different people voting in opposite directions is a sign of an echo chamber.
> For example the Google Memo. Even the slightest hint that someone agrees (on specific points) with damore was a guarantee for downvotes.
Which specific points? Because looking at the recent 782 (currently) thread on him losing the NLRB case [0], I don't see many posts downvoted to gray on any side, with plenty of people posting things which are generally supportive of Damore without being downvoted.
But it's still been downvoted. It's a downvoted post. It's also been upvoted, and has been upvoted more than it was downvoted. But people talking about downvotes aren't always talking about the combined up / down total.
>If you do not conform, you will be downvoted into oblivion.
Is that true though? Conform in what way?
Who cares about being downvoted anyway?? I don't get it. After a few tantrums about it, I've realized it doesn't matter, I don't need to add edit: Could downvoters explain why please if they don't explain. Why do I care about my internet points, why am I getting sucked in to caring about the gamification? Why does it matter?
Say you are right, some opinions, even expressed articulately, helpfully, admirably etc are still always downvoted "into oblivion". So if you care, if it's important for you to change minds on it, try even harder to be more informed, articulate, irreproachable than the alleged HN 'conformists'. Hehe already talking like that, 'If you do not conform' has that heroic-paranoid-martyr sound to it that frequently downvoted/rate-limited people get. The people that ranted bitterly on the What has HN given you? page. They think it's what they say that's the problem, but in my experience it's inevitably how they say it. But every further downvote just 'proves' to them they're right.
And I'm not sure why you think HN would be better without oblivion-downvoting/flagging. More like Youtube, sure. But better? "Completely killed any chance", "giant echo chamber".. such dramatic language. Is your tone of such absolute certainty justified? Well, still there are people who think the dominant 'conformity' on HN is pro-US, anti-US, socialist, libertarian, and pro- and anti- just about anything you can imagine.
When an unsubstantiated Docker or Kubernetes piece shows up as a story here, try asking a simple “why is that stubbornly getting pushed instead of alternatives?” and observe getting no answer to a simple “why?” while it gets downvoted under a pretense of being unsubstantiated, although the motivation for the story itself is unsubstantiated. What happens in reality is that you dared to ask a critical question which goes against ego-stroking and mob mentality. Or try asking or criticizing Rust or just mentioning Rust evangelism strike force to see just how much of an echo chamber this place is; it will be a fascinating psychosocial experiment on crowd mentality and ego-reassurance.
We are now at the point in our global societal evolution where why’s have become dangerous, considered oppositional, often considered confrontational, and that is deeply disturbing, because I’ve seen and lived through situations where such thinking leads. It’s a very subtle form of fascism in a different package. “HN” just reflects the wider systemic problems with group think dynamics.
>you dared to ask a critical question which goes against ego-stroking and mob mentality
But here's that paranoid-heroic-martyr tone again. Maybe it wasn't a "simple" question, but the frustration at these things happening again and again drives you to feel justified in petulant, angry accusations, or even just an irritatingly whiny tone. Doesn't it say in the guidelines not to question items, but to flag them etc? It's tedious for people to read that again and again. Just don't read them, maybe?
Sure, there are fashions in these things. And in all things. But why do you feel so superior and altogether above that, while using your psychobabble labels—"crowd mentality and ego-reassurance","evangelism"? The very downvoting you should expect as inevitable here is something you must fight and totally overcome everywhere, right now. (i.e. the hysterical quality people find so objectionable in SJWs) Really, 'fascism'?! You are the 'brave', 'daring' one huh? And they are the ones doing the 'ego-stroking'? Ah anyway, what do I know, I'm new here. Best wishes!
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadInvestors, customers, and peers read HN, so maintaining a clean history can seem moderately important.
I'm curious if you think there's a problem, and why. Maybe I'm just inside the bubble.
On controversial topics, I see lots of better comments downvoted for a while when they are new, but they tend to recover within a few hours.
It's an imperfect system, but I'd guess it is a net positive at least most of the time. It does help to filter out when people are just being total jerks.
With the amount you see people say 'I'll get downvoted for this but...' then go on to be the top post, I think the downvoted helps more than hurts.
There's groupthink of course, but I feel the HN community is more responsible with it, and that comes from someone who often disagrees with the majority (personally, rarely expressed).
One thing you can try is looking through your comment history and see which of your comments got the most upvotes. One of my highest upvotes was in a thread about whether software engineers should waste time doing telephone customer support, and I linked to a story of when William from Microsoft took a customer support call:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15813387
Another was a comment about where I got my first customers:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14192711
Or linking to a strategy for finding product ideas:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14040708
Checking your most upvoted comments can also be a way to find topics that you should turn into a blog post. If the HN community found it interesting and suddenly gave you 10x the upvotes you usually get, then it's probably also useful to the wider world.
When I've been downvoted, it's usually because I've poorly researched something & provided incorrect information.
I personally think the downvoting feature is fine, just really overused by people with much more karma that it makes the website less enjoyable to visit, especially for new people. And sure, one of the things I love about this site is that there are legitimate gurus on here, but a lot of people take their ability to downvote to classic Dunning Kruger syndrome.
Perhaps a quarter point penalty for downvoting to stop spamming and for people to consider the worthiness of a downvote or ignore. After all, Karma is how you treat others, and constantly negging them with no explanation isn't very kind at all especially for the majority of the people on this site that just want to learn.
I generally try to upvote only. It really annoys me to see some comment down voted to grey oblivion with no follow-up comments explaining why. Particularly when looking back at older topics; was the post wrong, or just unpopular?
HN Show Downvoted Comments as Normal CSS
Yes: it's a step against the filter bubble
I've yet to read anything dead that I'd describe using your verbiage.
[1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7818823
Sometimes you'll even find real accounts that have a years-long history of meaningful contribution. [0] It is most infuriating when these people get hellbanned just for pushing the limit once, or for triggering the mods extra hard one day.
[Quick note on old accounts that earn hellbans: I've noticed a correlation between the posting of something MRA-ish/anti-feminist and accounts getting a permanent hellban. If you have such political leanings (which I'm not endorsing or supporting) and want your account to remain in good standing, don't let them leak out on HN. Go to your regularly-scheduled Disgusting Online Den of Scum and Villainy (TM). It may be that this is only noticed because most other hot-button issues are already understood to be taboo, but sometimes the gender-in-tech threads run afield...]
There is a whole cast of characters that you can only find if you showdead. Most of these people have since realized that it's a waste of time to post here and gone away, but you'll still see the regulars pop up now and then, or find them in historic threads.
There is pg_is_a_butt, whose posts are sometimes insightful, except he ends each one with something like "you're all idiots". There is LoseThos, author of the amazing TempleOS [1], who will usually post some form of incoherent babble that is framed up like scripture. These are usually not worth much by themselves, but they remind me that he exists, which is great. And there are the heartbreaking cases mentioned above, of good contributors getting flagged off and seeing their profile activity slowly peter out as they wonder why no one replies to their posts anymore. [Vouching can actually make this more confusing, because they have ONE comment that gets replies/interest, so assume they must not be shadowbanned, they just must be going senile and have nothing worth saying anymore. You'll also get your vouching rights revoked if you vouch for something the mods don't like.]
Anyway, there's usually a discernible reason for something to be dead, but it's frequently not a good one. You'll be missing out on a lot of good stuff by keeping showdead off.
Disclaimer, lest one plunge in too anxiously: there are also things that truly deserve the flag and/or ban, and you'll have to tolerate seeing that. It helps that HN doesn't allow media embeds, but do be careful following links, etc., and probably avoid if your sensitivity to offensive text or ideas is higher than your interest in useful-but-controversial information.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=X86BSD
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS
Ah 4chan, the only true bastion of the right to free speech
…
> You'll also get your vouching rights revoked if you vouch for something the mods don't like.
I really wish that HN could figure out a way to fix the problem of abusive moderation. Moderation is, I think, really important and valuable — but it's so important that it's easily misused.
And of course just crowd-sourcing it doesn't work, because the crowd can just shout down important viewpoints.
The brilliant comments which are 1+ day old all went to a blackhole nirvana.
I haven't submitted much but occasionally comment around.
Glad I'm not the only procrastinator though the allure to be able to down vote trolls is very, very real.
You are winning by not being able to downvote yet.
EDIT: ...as I up-vote y'all stuck in this thread...
However, if you're careful you can use your upvotes against those comments that you don't like by upvoting everything around them.
Try posting here about anything related to nutrition and the health risks of eating meat...
On Slashdot, upvotes and downvotes each came with a label. So upvote wasn't just an up-arrow, it was more like "+1, Helpful" or "+1, Funny". And downvotes weren't just a down arrow, the options were like "-1, Off Topic" or "-1, Abusive". Don't hold me to the actual labels, but you get the idea. There was also a cap; each post could only go so far down (can't remember) or up (pretty sure that was 5). Overall, this system was called moderation.
There was also meta-moderation, where people had to review someone else's votes up or down, and verify them. This way, people who were making bad votes could get caught by the community.
The ability to moderate or meta-moderate was hooked into the karma score, but I can't remember exactly how. Meta-moderation was like a chore you had to do sometimes to maintain the right to moderate, as I recall.
I'm sure there is a write-up somewhere that could do a better job than my off-teh-cuff remembering.
At some point, you could adjust your personal measure for the categories of positive or negative moderation. e.g., threads turned into boring rushes to post memes for +1 Funny, so at one point I made Funny worth zero and Insightful worth +2. It was an interesting way to influence how a thread appeared for you. But around that time, I lost interest in the site and quit it for HN.
You couldn't vote all the time (like on HN), but you periodically received 5 mod points to use, so you would tend to pick the most deserving to boost or demote.
From memory, periodically, you might get meta-moderation points. Say, 10 chances to assess whether a post's moderation was fair or unfair. It was half-chore, half-interesting so it was often a happy distraction.
More info for those with too much time on their hands:
This is a worthwhile video to watch on the subject if interested: http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2010/07/5_reputation_...
[0] - https://i.imgur.com/s0EpZOH.png
I say this because I often get downvoted because people don't understand my point (sometimes due to my own fault badly explaining myself, sometimes the readers fault for skimming my post) and it's not until several downvoted before someone finally chimes in an clarifies why.
Negative rep get so badly abused on this site and the most frustrating thing about it all is whenever the topic gets raised you get downvoted to hell.
There is also a disappointing trend to kneejerk downvote any comment that disagrees with any of the "famous" (for want a better description) names on HN simply because member "xyz" must be wrong if they're arguing with the famed member "abc"; regardless of whatever point xyz had made. It's daft hero worshipping.
Then there's the amount of times people can get down voted on popular threads just because they dared express and unpopular opinion.
Overall I genuinely think the quality of comments on this site has dropped over the years and I think it's directly related to the increase in members reaching the threshold to negative moderate. It gets harder to have an adult conversation when half the time people are kneejerk downvoting rather than posting a rebuttal or simply asking for clarification on why an opinion was formed to begin with. It's gotten to the point that I'm sure many people now question whether they can be bothered with the potential backlash or whether they're better off just keeping quiet. Which results in some tropes (for want a better description) not getting peer reviewed or debunked because it's such a popular piece of misinformation that the correction isn't worth the backlash.
Lastly, I get sick of people saying we shouldn't take negative rep personally. It's someone actively saying "I don't agree with you but I'm not going to state why." There is no other response to that other than frustration.
I downvoted because I disagree with you.
The purpose of downvoting is to reduce the effective signal to noise ratio by:
(1) reducing the prominence of low-quality posts, and
(2) signalling the types of posts the community finds to be low quality, which will then be reduced in prominence.
Commenting increases the prominence of a post, and as such counteracts part of the purpose of downvotes. It may occasionally be warranted to reinforce the other half of the purpose, but generally not.
> I say this because I often get downvoted because people don't understand my point
Just because someone else suggests that as their reason or a possible reason does not mean that is why other people are downvoting you.
> There is also a disappointing trend to kneejerk downvote any comment that disagrees with any of the "famous" (for want a better description) names on HN simply because member "xyz" must be wrong if they're arguing with the famed member "abc"; regardless of whatever point xyz had made.
I don't think that's true at all; I do think that replies to some of the more well-known posters are more likely to get read and, therefore, voted up or down, but I don't see a lot of evidence for the kind of fan-club voting you suggest (I don't think I'd be on the leaderboard if that was the case, since I think even when I was fairly new a fair share of my posts were disagreeing with some of the more prominent figures here.)
> Then there's the amount of times people can get down voted on popular threads just because they dared express and unpopular opinion.
IME, that doesn't really happen. Any opinion on a controversial thread can get downvoted for no apparent reason -- there defintely are people who downvote for shallow disagreement -- but it rarely seems to last if there isn't a better reason for downvoting, and it seems to happen across the space of ideas (I've seen HN be accused of being a left-wing hive mind, a libertarian hive-mind, and a hive-mind of several different other bents; its not any of those, its got lots of different active factions with lots of different views.)
> It gets harder to have an adult conversation when half the time people are kneejerk downvoting rather than posting a rebuttal or simply asking for clarification on why an opinion was formed to begin with.
I'd rather say it gets harder to have an adult conversation when people lack the introspection to realize the reasons that their comments are getting downvoted into oblivion while others expressing similar ideology in a different manner or not has nothing to do with disagreement, or popular poster fan clubs, and everything to do with the quality of their posts.
> There is no other response to that other than frustration.
Yes, there is another possible response and its called introspection and review of the guidelines.
I've gotten posts downvoted, and of those that have stayed that way more than a few hours, the vast majority have deserved it and I've gotten better at not making the same mistakes. Sure, I think there have been some mistakes (but I have seen a lot more cases of posts of mine being upvoted that don't deserve it.)
...whereas in practice it's often used as a "I disagree" button.
BTW Personally I often check flagged stories - they tell quite a lot about the HN community and deeply rooted prejudices.
Also I think from your last paragraph you do agree that moderation often gets abused even if you don't agree with the individual points I raised?
I think it works well in aggregate, even though there are some individual bad votes. I think that the system is designed in a way which anticipates imperfection in individual acts but is designed to get good results on-balance, and I think obsessing about the individual bad votes is unproductive in most cases.
I disagree with this bit:
> Im a firm believer that one shouldn't be allowed to downvote without leaving a comment.
I think the site needs a mechanism where people can express disagreement without leaving a comment, because a downvote is mostly meaningless and comments can lead to angry bickering threads.
I do agree (and I've changed my mind on this in the past 2 years or so) that people downvote too quickly, and that people don't supply enough corrective upvotes.
I guess that's been discussed/thought about many times. Does sound good at first. So how would it work? People would have to leave some kind of decent comment, not just one word, I suppose, like other comments. Could you downvote those comments in turn if they weren't substantive, or were snarky etc? Would you have then to explain why you did that? Hmm. There'd have to be a different comment category, a downvote-explanation comment. Sounds complicated..
> There is no other response to that other than frustration.
Well, yes there is! I tried that, doesn't work. I tried not caring. Is working great! They're only fake internet points, after all. But you said you're sick of people saying that. Sorry. ..Sometimes it's just too obvious why horrid, abusive comments are downvoted. From what I've seen, how people say things is almost always the problem, not what they said. What seems to drive people nuts is presuming it's always what they said.
I used to believe that until I put it into practice on my forum. Nah, turns out there's a class of comment that's so stupid that you're just forcing people to waste their time by responding to it. And that sort of comment is more common than you think, you just may be insulated from them by the work of other people.
Browse reddit by controversial posts first, for example.
Sometimes I will disable it on HN if I'm engaging in a lot of discussions where I'd like to be able to see if other comments have been downvoted. If anyone else here uses this plugin, I'd be very interested to know if you've disabled it on HN or if you find the functionality to be helpful. We can make it default on/off on certain sites, so feedback is appreciated.
If you do not conform, you will be downvoted into oblivion. So people censor themselves as a result.
I see radically divergent opinions on many threads which are not "downvoted into oblivion".
The things I do see downvoted into oblivion are usually unsubstantive and/or uncivil, and themselves come from all directions, often from a similar apparent ideology to comments that are not downvoted.
But if people who would otherwise post in a similar manner to the posts downvoted into oblivion are censoring themselves, I think the functionality is working as intended.
Either the admins are turning a blind eye, or they're not paying attention. At this point my money is on the former.
The supreme irony of course is that lately the most recurring instances are about the memo that was titled "Google's ideological echo chamber". It's an open secret which cliques have a septic response to disagreement, and who simply wants to be heard but is treated as malicious.
Empathy for me, not for thee, and feelings of safety are more important than actual safety. The content of people's skin is more important than their character.
There's an obvious pattern of removing threads about contentious issues from the front page due to an overt automated moderation feature referred to as the "flamewar detector" designed to demote posts than generate more heat than light, judged by comments vs. upvotes on the post. This is reinforced by the fact that posts that are likely to turn into flamewars are also likely to get flagged by users who are tired of the recurring flamewars.
Of course, removing such posts from the front page is a completely different issue (independent of methodology) from bias in downvotes.
It is also pretty ridiculous to posit no link between the different moderation mechanisms. Being downvoted unjustly and reflexively is going to annoy commenters and make them comment back in defense. It sends a social signal that some view is unacceptable, which makes them look like troublemakers a priori.
It's also inaccurate to call this an overt feature, because there is no disclosure on affected threads. While I'm sympathetic to not wanting to stoke fires, it's fair to think the system is being gamed when I never see this happen to threads that skew in the opposite direction about a story that promotes the orthodox view. It will also create exactly the kind of unresolved discussions that guarantee a repeat until the end of time, as a self fulfilling prophecy.
The vigorous discussion should be a sign that people do want to discuss it, and I'm not convinced the flaggers and downvoters are representative of what the community at large believes. In the case of the Damore memo, informal anonymous surveys inside Google showed a very mixed landscape, in a company that skews very orthodox already. For a community that draws from a much wider geography, it is fair to assume even more disagreement. There is ample evidence of ends-justifies-means behavior from the people who want to impose their moral order on the tech scene, and pretending it isn't happening, under the guise of promoting reasonable debate, is incredibly naive.
If anything, these threads should be explicitly allowed to stand, leaving it up to individuals to decide whether to wade in, perhaps with a "keep it civil" preamble.
I didn't say it did, I said that the mechanism which detects controversy withoutbconcern for ideology was far more likely to blame than an ideological bias.
Obviously, HN is responsible for the existence of the mechanism.
> or guarantee objectivity,
I don't see objectivity as a goal in the first place. The overt standard for inclusion in HN [0], “anything good hackers would find interesting”, that which “gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity”; not “[m]ost stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon” [emphasis added] are inherently highly subjective.
If you want objectivity, a community whose overt standards are highly subjective is not where you want to go. But it's quite odd to come and sign up for a community with such overt standards and then spend a lot of time complaining about the lack of objectivity—it was literally what you signed up for.
> Being downvoted unjustly and reflexively is going to annoy commenters and make them comment back in defense.
Commenting on downvotes is explicitly against the commenting guidelines. Downvotes do not, under any circumstances, compel responses, nor will they ever produce responses from people following the rules of the community.
To the extent that people are positing about downvotes they or others have recieved, they are deliberately and wantonly violating the norms of the community by so doing (it's also quite stupid, even aside from the norms, to do so quickly because on controversial topics inappropriate downvotes are quite often negated within a few hours.)
> The vigorous discussion should be a sign that people do want to discuss it
Which they can (and do) continue to do, and if you want to catch those ongoing controversies you can browse in “comments” view instead of the front page. The front page is for things that generate more light than heat. You can choose your view based on your preferences.
Having seen some atrocious perspectives and opinions and Hacker News, being able to challenge some one or offer a rebuttal that doesn't turn into a comment storm is important. I don't want to engage with a troll. I want to give them a down vote and hope they're flagged and removed more often than not (I can't down vote anyone yet...).
But, there's a fine line between down voting some one because they're offensive, obtuse or obnoxious and disagreeing with some one's opinion.
I don't agree with you. In fact I outright disagree with your opinion on HN becoming an echo chamber. I believe HN is far an echo chamber, I also think it's far more diverse than most. But naturally and organically the opinions here tend to confirm with a certain bias and I like to think that's because we here on HN take more time to discuss our conversations and perspectives than the echo chambers you find on Reddit or on Facebook.
I want to believe HN is more in line with a common good, a common ideal and common truth of humanity (you can call me out on being naive here if you wish, I'm feeling more optimistic today than I normally do and I don't know why but let's let sleeping dogs lie, my cynicism is usually relentless...).
So, yeah. I disagree with you. But I wouldn't down vote you. Even if I could.
Edit: poor choice of words, sentence structure, I rushed it all to get it out in time in the hope one day I can get to 500 karma and down vote trolls.
I wouldn't say its a black and white issue. It heavily depends on the topic. For example the Google Memo. Even the slightest hint that someone agrees (on specific points) with damore was a guarantee for downvotes. In that case i would say HN reflects some sort of echo chamber.
I don't think different people voting in opposite directions is a sign of an echo chamber.
Which specific points? Because looking at the recent 782 (currently) thread on him losing the NLRB case [0], I don't see many posts downvoted to gray on any side, with plenty of people posting things which are generally supportive of Damore without being downvoted.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16396554
Is that true though? Conform in what way?
Who cares about being downvoted anyway?? I don't get it. After a few tantrums about it, I've realized it doesn't matter, I don't need to add edit: Could downvoters explain why please if they don't explain. Why do I care about my internet points, why am I getting sucked in to caring about the gamification? Why does it matter?
Say you are right, some opinions, even expressed articulately, helpfully, admirably etc are still always downvoted "into oblivion". So if you care, if it's important for you to change minds on it, try even harder to be more informed, articulate, irreproachable than the alleged HN 'conformists'. Hehe already talking like that, 'If you do not conform' has that heroic-paranoid-martyr sound to it that frequently downvoted/rate-limited people get. The people that ranted bitterly on the What has HN given you? page. They think it's what they say that's the problem, but in my experience it's inevitably how they say it. But every further downvote just 'proves' to them they're right.
And I'm not sure why you think HN would be better without oblivion-downvoting/flagging. More like Youtube, sure. But better? "Completely killed any chance", "giant echo chamber".. such dramatic language. Is your tone of such absolute certainty justified? Well, still there are people who think the dominant 'conformity' on HN is pro-US, anti-US, socialist, libertarian, and pro- and anti- just about anything you can imagine.
It is very real. And systemic.
When an unsubstantiated Docker or Kubernetes piece shows up as a story here, try asking a simple “why is that stubbornly getting pushed instead of alternatives?” and observe getting no answer to a simple “why?” while it gets downvoted under a pretense of being unsubstantiated, although the motivation for the story itself is unsubstantiated. What happens in reality is that you dared to ask a critical question which goes against ego-stroking and mob mentality. Or try asking or criticizing Rust or just mentioning Rust evangelism strike force to see just how much of an echo chamber this place is; it will be a fascinating psychosocial experiment on crowd mentality and ego-reassurance.
We are now at the point in our global societal evolution where why’s have become dangerous, considered oppositional, often considered confrontational, and that is deeply disturbing, because I’ve seen and lived through situations where such thinking leads. It’s a very subtle form of fascism in a different package. “HN” just reflects the wider systemic problems with group think dynamics.
But here's that paranoid-heroic-martyr tone again. Maybe it wasn't a "simple" question, but the frustration at these things happening again and again drives you to feel justified in petulant, angry accusations, or even just an irritatingly whiny tone. Doesn't it say in the guidelines not to question items, but to flag them etc? It's tedious for people to read that again and again. Just don't read them, maybe?
Sure, there are fashions in these things. And in all things. But why do you feel so superior and altogether above that, while using your psychobabble labels—"crowd mentality and ego-reassurance","evangelism"? The very downvoting you should expect as inevitable here is something you must fight and totally overcome everywhere, right now. (i.e. the hysterical quality people find so objectionable in SJWs) Really, 'fascism'?! You are the 'brave', 'daring' one huh? And they are the ones doing the 'ego-stroking'? Ah anyway, what do I know, I'm new here. Best wishes!
And HN is not really an echo chamber, there is an substantial audience for right-wing conservative thought, as per my observation.
Also asking questions about the article can get you downvoted.